If I wanted to rig the
elections

by Gus Lagman

If I wanted to rig the 2016 national and local elections
(NLE), here’s a list of what I would do:

1.

First and most important, I
would recommend to the appointing powers
(assuming I have a strong influence on this
individual or group), candidates for Comelec
Chairman and Commissioners who would follow
my bidding. Corrupt election lawyers would
be good candidates. While I personally know
some who are honest, there are quite a few
who are known experts in election cheating
and who, at the right price, would easily
agree to conspire with me. I have personally
heard one say that they could open ballot
boxes without breaking their seals. I can
only conclude that he had been involved in
that dishonest practice.

I would not choose honest IT and management
practitioners who would recommend good
systems with proper controls. With them
around, it would be next to impossible for
me to tamper with the results of elections.
Also, they would recommend systems that are
so inexpensive that there won’t be enough
money to play around with (that is, after
the money passes through our pockets).

2.

For the automation of
elections, I would choose a non-transparent
precinct-counting technology, like Direct
Recording Electronic (DRE), Optical Mark
Recognition (OMR), or some similar systems.
As such, it would be difficult to trace
machine-embedded cheating mechanisms. In
addition, the protest process would be so
weakened that there will be very few of
them.

3.

I would look for a vendor
who would be willing to “play ball” with me.
I would commit a sure win for them, come
bidding time. If I could, I’d also get “my”
Comelec Commissioners to award to them
contracts on a negotiated basis. It should
not be difficult to find such a vendor; the
Internet has a wealth of information on the
bad eggs of election automation.

4.

I would instruct “my”
Commissioners to rig the bidding so that my
chosen vendor would win, no matter what.
Being lawyers, they would take care of
looking for legal angles and justification,
lame as they might be, so there’s a
semblance of fairness in the bidding
process.

5.

I would tell “my”
Commissioners not to worry about violating
laws and even their own bidding rules.
Election advocates will complain, but they
should just be ignored.

6.

I would instruct my chosen
vendor to rig the computer programs to favor
certain candidates – which means rigging
both the precinct-counting machines and the
Consolidation and Canvassing System (CCS).

7.

I would not bother hiring
outside service providers to manage the
project as doing so would only make my
control of the operation more difficult.

8.

In order that the cheating
mechanisms in the computer programs would
not be discovered, I would look for ways by
which review of the source code by political
parties and groups would not happen.
Allowing it would only open the risk that
the embedded cheating mechanisms would be
discovered.

9.

I would ignore the legal
requirement for digital signatures to make
the transmissions easy to manipulate.

10.

I would tell the machine
vendor not to provide the complete Election
Returns (ER) data and the canvassing data in
Comelec’s public website so no one can check
if the consolidation and canvassing of the
results are accurate; we could pass on the
blame to the telecommunications companies
for the incomplete data.

11.

To make sure protests will
not prove anything fishy, I would cause the
printing of additional ballots, even after
the elections, so that we could replace the
contents of the ballot boxes to match the
machine-printed and “doctored” results.

12.

If some individuals or
groups try to block my plans, I would
instruct Comelec to call them “election
saboteurs”, “trouble-makers”, or
“attention-getters.”

13.

I would also look for “envelopmental”
journalists who will write articles
attacking and discrediting those
“trouble-makers”.

14.

I would try to influence
some legislators to become “mouth-pieces” of
the Comelec and its machine vendor.

15.

If I had any influence in
the Supreme Court, I would make it known to
the justices that there are no alternatives
to the Comelec-chosen machine and that for
the sake of our elections, the Court should
support the decisions of the Comelec.